Israel
consistently expressed a desire to negotiate with its
neighbors. In an address to the UN General Assembly on October
10, 1960, Foreign Minister Golda Meir challenged
Arab leaders to meet with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to
negotiate a peace settlement. Egyptian President Nasser
answered on October 15, saying that Israel was trying
to deceive the world, and reiterating that his country
would never recognize the Jewish State.1

The
Arabs were equally adamant in their refusal to negotiate
a separate settlement for the refugees. Nasser made
clear that solving the refugee issue was not his concern.
“The danger of Israel,” he said, “lies
in the very existence of Israel as it is in the present
and in what she represents.2

Meanwhile,
Syria used the Golan Heights, which
tower 3,000 feet above the Galilee, to shell Israeli
farms and villages. Syria’s attacks grew more
frequent in 1965 and 1966, while Nasser’s rhetoric
became increasingly bellicose: “We shall not
enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand,” he
said on March 8, 1965.
“We shall enter it with its soil saturated in
blood.”3

Again,
a few months later, Nasser expressed the Arabs’ aspiration: “...the
full restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people.
In other words, we aim at the destruction of the State
of Israel. The immediate aim: perfection of Arab military
might. The national aim: the eradication of Israel.”4

MYTH

“Israel’s
military strike in 1967 was unprovoked.”

FACT

A
combination of bellicose Arab rhetoric, threatening
behavior and, ultimately, an act of war left Israel
no choice but preemptive action. To do this successfully,
Israel needed the element of surprise. Had it waited
for an Arab invasion, Israel would have been at a potentially
catastrophic disadvantage.

While
Nasser continued to make speeches threatening war,
Arab terrorist attacks
grew more frequent. In 1965, 35 raids were conducted
against Israel. In 1966, the number increased to 41.
In just the first four months of 1967, 37 attacks were
launched.5

Meanwhile,
Syria’s attacks on Israeli kibbutzim from
the Golan Heights provoked
a retaliatory strike on April 7, 1967, during which
Israeli planes shot down six Syrian MiGs. Shortly thereafter,
the Soviet Union
— which had been providing military and economic
aid to both Syria and Egypt — gave Damascus
information alleging a massive Israeli military buildup
in preparation for an attack. Despite Israeli denials,
Syria decided to invoke its defense treaty with Egypt.

On
May 15, Israel’s Independence Day,
Egyptian troops began moving into the Sinai and massing
near the Israeli border. By May 18, Syrian troops were
prepared for battle along the Golan Heights.

Nasser
ordered the UN Emergency Force, stationed
in the Sinai since 1956, to withdraw on May 16. Without
bringing the matter to the attention of the General Assembly, as his predecessor
had promised, Secretary-General U Thant complied with
the demand. After the withdrawal of the UNEF, the Voice
of the Arabs proclaimed (May 18, 1967):

As
of today, there no longer exists an international emergency
force to protect Israel. We shall exercise patience
no more. We shall not complain any more to the UN about
Israel. The sole method we shall apply against Israel
is total war, which will result in the extermination
of Zionist existence.6

An
enthusiastic echo was heard on May 20 from Syrian Defense
Minister Hafez Assad:

Our
forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the
aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself,
and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland.
The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is
united....I, as a military man, believe that the time
has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.7

On
May 22, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to
all Israeli shipping and all ships bound for Eilat. This blockade cut off
Israel’s
only supply route with Asia and stopped the flow of oil from
its main supplier, Iran. The following day, President
Johnson declared the blockade
illegal and tried, unsuccessfully, to
organize an international flotilla to test it.

Nasser
was fully aware of the pressure he was exerting to
force Israel’s
hand. The day after the blockade was set up, he said
defiantly: “The Jews threaten to make war. I
reply: Welcome! We are ready for war.”8

Nasser
challenged Israel to fight almost daily.
“Our basic objective will be the destruction
of Israel. The Arab people want to fight,” he
said on May 27.9The following day,
he added: “We will not accept any...coexistence
with Israel...Today the issue is not the establishment
of peace between the Arab states and Israel....The
war with Israel is in effect since 1948.”10

The
armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised
on the borders of Israel...to face the challenge, while
standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria,
Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation. This act will
astound the world. Today they will know that the Arabs
are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived.
We have reached the stage of serious action and not
declarations.11

President
Abdur Rahman Aref of Iraq joined in the war of words: “The
existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified.
This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which
has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear -- to
wipe Israel off the map.”12 On June 4, Iraq
joined the military alliance with Egypt, Jordan and
Syria.

The
Arab rhetoric was matched by the mobilization of Arab
forces. Approximately 250,000 troops (nearly half in
Sinai), more than 2,000 tanks and 700 aircraft ringed
Israel.13

By
this time, Israeli forces had been on alert for three
weeks. The country could not remain fully mobilized
indefinitely, nor could it allow its sea lane through
the Gulf of Aqaba to be interdicted. Israel’s
best option was to strike first. On June 5, the order
was given to attack Egypt.

Israel Before the 1967 War

MYTH

“Nasser
had the right to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli
shipping.”

FACT

In 1956, the United States
gave Israel assurances that it recognized the Jewish
State’s
right of access to the Straits of Tiran. In 1957, at
the UN, 17 maritime powers declared that Israel had
a right to transit the Strait. Moreover, the blockade
violated the Convention on the Territorial Sea and
Contiguous Zone, which was adopted by the UN Conference
on the Law of the Sea on April 27, 1958.14

The
closure of the Strait of Tiran was the casus belli
in 1967. Israel’s
attack was a reaction to this Egyptian first strike.

President
Johnson acknowledged as much after the war (June 19,
1967):

If
a single act of folly was more responsible for this
explosion than any other it was the arbitrary and dangerous
announced decision that the Strait of Tiran would be
closed. The right of innocent maritime passage must
be preserved for all nations.15

MYTH

“The
United States helped Israel defeat the Arabs in six
days.”

FACT

The
United States tried to prevent the war through negotiations,
but it could not persuade Nasser or the other Arab
states to cease their belligerent statements and actions.
Still, right before the war, President
Johnson warned: “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go alone.”16 Then,
when the war began, the State Department announced: “Our
position is neutral in thought, word and deed.”17

Moreover,
while the Arabs were falsely accusing the United States
of airlifting supplies to Israel, Johnson imposed an
arms embargo on the region (France, Israel’s
other main arms supplier, also embargoed arms to Israel).

By
contrast, the Soviets were supplying massive amounts
of arms to the Arabs. Simultaneously, the armies of Kuwait, Algeria, Saudi
Arabia and Iraq were contributing troops
and arms to the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian fronts.18

MYTH

“Israel
attacked Jordan to capture Jerusalem.”

FACT

Prime
Minister Levi Eshkol sent a message to King
Hussein saying Israel would not attack Jordan unless
he initiated hostilities. When Jordanian radar picked
up a cluster of planes flying from Egypt to Israel,
and the Egyptians convinced Hussein the planes were
theirs, he then ordered
the shelling of West Jerusalem. It turned out the planes
were Israel’s,
and were returning from destroying the Egyptian air
force on the ground. Meanwhile,
Syrian and Iraqi troops attacked Israel’s northern
frontier.

Had
Jordan not attacked, the status of Jerusalem would not have
changed during the course of the war. Once the city
came under fire, however, Israel needed to defend it,
and, in doing so, took the opportunity to unify its
capital once and for all.

MYTH

“Israel
did not have to shoot first.”

FACT

After
just six days of fighting, Israeli forces broke through
the enemy lines and were in a position to march on
Cairo, Damascus and Amman. A cease­fire was invoked
on June 10.

The
victory came at a very high cost. In storming the Golan
Heights, Israel suffered 115 dead — roughly
the number of Americans killed during Operation Desert
Storm. Altogether, Israel lost twice as many men — 777
dead and 2,586 wounded — in proportion to her
total population as the U.S. lost in eight years of
fighting in Vietnam.19 Also,
despite the incredible success of the air campaign,
the Israeli Air
Force lost 46 of its 200 fighters.20 Had
Israel waited for the Arabs to strike first, as it
did in 1973, and not taken preemptive action, the cost
would certainly have been much higher and victory could
not have been assured.

MYTH

“Israel
had no intention of negotiating over the future
of the territories it captured.”

FACT

By
the end of the war, Israel had captured
enough territory to more than triple the size of the
area it controlled, from 8,000 to 26,000 square miles.
The victory enabled Israel to unify Jerusalem.
Israeli forces had also captured the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Israel’s
leaders expected to negotiate a peace agreement
with their neighbors and, almost immediately
after the war, expressed their willingness
to negotiate a return of at least some of
the territories. Israel subsequently returned
all of the Sinai to Egypt, territory
claimed by Jordan was returned
to the Hashemite Kingdom, and
all of the Gaza Strip and
more than 50 percent of the West Bank were
given to the Palestinian Authority.

To
date, approximately 94 percent of the territories
won in the defensive
war have been given by Israel to its Arab
neighbors. This demonstrates
Israel’s willingness to make territorial
compromises.

Cease-Fire Lines
After the Six-Day War

MYTH

“Israel
expelled peaceful Arab villagers from the West Bank
and prevented them from returning after the war.”

FACT

After Jordan launched its attack
on June 5, approximately 325,000 Palestinians living
in the West Bank fled.21 These
were Jordanian citizens who moved from one part of
what they considered their country to another, primarily
to avoid being caught in the cross fire of a war.

A
Palestinian refugee who was an administrator in a UNRWA camp
in Jericho said Arab politicians had spread rumors
in the camp. “They said all the young people
would be killed. People heard on the radio that this
is not the end, only the beginning, so they think maybe
it will be a long war and they want to be in Jordan.”22

Some
Palestinians who left preferred to live in an Arab
state rather than under Israeli military rule. Members
of various PLO factions fled to
avoid capture by the Israelis. Nils-Göran Gussing,
the person appointed by the UN Secretary-General to investigate
the situation, found that many Arabs also feared they
would no longer be able to receive money from family
members working abroad.23

Israeli
forces ordered a handful of Palestinians to move for “strategic
and security reasons.” In some cases, they were
allowed to return in a few days, in others Israel offered
to help them resettle elsewhere.24

Israel
now ruled more than three-quarters of a million Palestinians — most
of whom were hostile to the government. Nevertheless,
more than 9,000 Palestinian families were reunited
in 1967. Ultimately, more than 60,000 Palestinians
were allowed to return.25

After
the Six-Day War ended, President Johnson
announced his view of what was required next
to end the conflict:

“Certainly,
troops must be withdrawn; but there must
also be recognized rights of national life,
progress in solving the refugee problem,
freedom of innocent maritime passage, limitation
of the arms race and respect for political
independence and territorial integrity.”26

MYTH

“During
the 1967 War, Israel deliberately
attacked the USS Liberty.”

FACT

The
Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was
a grievous error, largely attributable to
the fact that it occurred in the midst of
the confusion of a
full-scale war in 1967. Ten
official United States investigations and
three official Israeli
inquiries have all conclusively established
the attack was a tragic mistake.

On June 8, 1967, the fourth
day of the Six-Day
War, the Israeli high command received
reports that Israeli troops in El Arish were
being fired upon from the sea, presumably
by an Egyptian vessel, as they had a day
before. The United States had announced that
it had no naval forces within hundreds of
miles of the battle front on the floor of
the United
Nations a few days earlier; however,
the USS Liberty, an American intelligence
ship under the dual control of the Defense
Intelligence Agency/Central Intelligence
Agency and the Sixth Fleet, was assigned
to monitor the fighting. As a result of a
series of United States communication failures,
whereby messages directing the ship not to
approach within 100 miles were not received
by the Liberty, the ship sailed to
within 14 miles off the Sinai coast. The
Israelis mistakenly thought this was the
ship shelling its soldiers and war planes
and torpedo boats attacked, killing 34 members
of the Liberty's crew and wounding
171. Ships from the Sixth Fleet were directed
to launch four attack aircraft with fighter
cover to defend the Liberty, but the
planes were recalled after a message was
received at the White House that the Israelis
had admitted they had attacked the ship.

Tapes
of the radio transmissions made prior, during
and after the attack do not contain any statement
suggesting the pilots saw a U.S. flag before
the attack on
the ship. During the raid,
a pilot specifically says,
“there is no flag on her!” The
recordings also indicate that once the pilots
became concerned about the identity of the
ship, by virtue of reading its hull number,
they terminated the attack and they were
given an order to leave the area.27 Critics
claimed the Israeli tape was doctored, but
the National Security Agency of the United
States released formerly top secret transcripts
in July 2003 that confirmed the Israeli version.

Numerous
mistakes were made by both the United States and Israel.
For example, the Liberty was first reported —
incorrectly, as it turned out — to be cruising
at 30 knots (it was later recalculated to be 28 knots).
Under Israeli (and U.S.) naval doctrine at the time,
a ship proceeding at that speed was presumed to be
a warship. The sea was calm and the U.S. Navy Court
of Inquiry found that the Liberty’s
flag was very likely drooped and not discernible; moreover,
members of the crew, including the Captain, Commander
William McGonagle, testified that the flag was knocked
down after the first or second assault.

According
to Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin’smemoirs, there were standing orders to attack
any unidentified vessel near the shore.28 The
day fighting began, Israel had asked that American
ships be removed from its coast or that it be notified
of the precise location of U.S. vessels.29 The Sixth Fleet
was moved because President Johnson feared being drawn
into a confrontation with the Soviet Union. He also
ordered that no aircraft be sent near Sinai.

A
CIA report on the incident issued June 13, 1967, also
found that an overzealous pilot could mistake the Liberty for
an Egyptian ship, the El Quseir. After the air
raid, Israeli torpedo boats identified the Liberty as
an Egyptian naval vessel. When the Liberty began
shooting at the Israelis, they responded
with the torpedo attack, which killed 28
of the sailors. In 1981, the National Security
Agency noted that
accounts by members of the Liberty crew
and others did not have access to the relevant
signal intelligence reports or the confidential
explanation provided by Israel to the United
States, which were used in the CIA investigation.
The NSA concluded: “While these [signal
intelligence of Israeli communications] reports
revealed some confusion on the part of the
pilots concerning the nationality of the
ship, they tended to rule out any thesis
that the Israeli Navy and Air Force deliberately
attacked a ship they knew to be American.”29a

Initially,
the Israelis were terrified that they had attacked
a Soviet ship and might have provoked the Soviets
to join the fighting.30 Once
the Israelis were sure what had happened, they reported
the incident to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and offered
to provide a helicopter for the Americans to fly out
to the ship and to any help they
required to evacuate the injured and salvage
the ship. The offer was accepted and a U.S. naval attaché was
flown to the Liberty.

The
Israelis were “obviously shocked” by
the error they made in attacking the ship,
according to theU.S.
Ambassador in Tel
Aviv.
In fact, according to a secret report on
the 1967 war,
the immediate concern was that the Arabs
might see the proximity of the Liberty to
the conflict as evidence of U.S.-Israel collusion.31 A
second secret report concluded, “While
the attack showed a degree of impetuosity
and recklessness, it was also clear that
the presence of a U.S. naval vessel, unannounced,
that close to belligerent shores at a time
when we had made much of the fact that
no U.S. military forces were moving near
the area of hostilities was inviting disaster.”31a

A
U.S. spy plane was sent to the area as soon as the
NSA learned of the attack on the Liberty and
recorded the conversations of two Israeli Air
Force helicopter pilots, which took place between
2:30 and 3:37 p.m. on June 8. The orders radioed to
the pilots by their supervisor at the Hatzor base instructing
them to search for Egyptian survivors from the “Egyptian
warship”
that had just been bombed were also recorded by the
NSA. “Pay attention. The ship is now identified
as Egyptian,” the pilots were informed. Nine
minutes later, Hatzor told the pilots the ship was
believed to be an Egyptian cargo ship. At 3:07, the
pilots were first told the ship might not be Egyptian
and were instructed to search for survivors and inform
the base immediately the nationality of the first person
they rescued. It was not until 3:12 that one of the
pilots reported that he saw an American flag flying
over the ship at which point he was instructed to verify
if it was indeed a U.S. vessel.32

In
October 2003, the first Israeli pilot to reach the
ship broke his 36-year silence on the attack. Brig.-Gen.
Yiftah Spector said he had been told an Egyptian ship
was off the Gaza coast. “This ship positively
did not have any symbol or flag that I could see. What
I was concerned with was that it was not one of ours.
I looked for the symbol of our navy, which was a large
white cross on its deck. This was not there, so it
wasn’t one of ours.” The Jerusalem Post obtained
a recording of Spector’s
radio transmission in which he said, “I can’t
identify it, but in any case it’s
a military ship.”33

Many
of the survivors of the Liberty remain bitter,
and are convinced the attack was deliberate. None of
Israel’s accusers, however, can explain why Israel
would deliberately attack an American ship at a time
when the United States was Israel’s
only friend and supporter in the world. Confusion in
a long line of communications, which occurred in a
tense atmosphere on both the American and Israeli sides
is a more probable explanation.

Accidents
caused by “friendly fire” are common in
wartime. In 1988, the U.S. Navy mistakenly downed an
Iranian passenger plane, killing 290 civilians. During
the Gulf War, 35 of the 148 Americans who died in battle
were killed by “friendly fire.” In April
1994, two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters with large U.S.
flags painted on each side were shot down by U.S. Air
Force F-15s on a clear day in the “no fly” zone
of Iraq, killing 26 people. In April 2002, an American
F-16 dropped a bomb that killed four Canadian soldiers
in Afghanistan. In fact, the day before the Liberty was
attacked, Israeli pilots accidentally bombed one of
their own armored columns.34

Retired
Admiral, Shlomo Erell, who was Chief of the Navy in
Israel in June 1967, told the Associated Press (June
5, 1977): “No one would ever have dreamt that
an American ship would be there. Even the United States
didn’t
know where its ship was. We were advised by the proper
authorities that there was no American ship within
100 miles.”

Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara told Congress on July 26,
1967: “It was the conclusion of the investigatory
body, headed by an admiral of the Navy in whom we have
great confidence, that the attack was not intentional.” Twenty
years later, he repeated his belief that the attack
was a mistake, telling a caller on the “Larry
King Show” that he had seen nothing in the 20
years since to change his mind that there had been
no “cover­up.”35

In
January 2004, the State Department held a conference
on the Liberty incident and also released new
documents, including CIA memos dated June 13 and June
21, 1967,
that1967,
which say that Israel did not know it was striking
an American vessel. The historian for the National
Security Agency, David Hatch, said the available evidence “strongly
suggested” Israel did not know it was attacking
a U.S. ship. Two former U.S. officials, Ernest Castle,
the United States Naval Attaché at
the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in June 1967, who received
the first report of the attack from Israel, and John
Hadden, then CIA Chief of Station in Tel Aviv, also
agreed with the assessment that the attack on the Liberty was
a mistake.36

Israel
apologized for the tragedy and paid nearly $13 million
in humanitarian reparations to the United States and
to the families of the victims in amounts established
by the U.S. State Department. The matter was officially
closed between the two governments by an exchange of
diplomatic notes on December 17, 1987.